It's been about 9 months since I last posted on here, but now that life is settled a bit I can explain what I've been up to and what's happening next!
I graduated from CCAD in December and immediately began the process of applying to the Design MFA program at The Ohio State University. Between work, moving apartments, and seeing family, I decided to take a step back from animation and assess what my next move was going to be. I found out in March that I got accepted to OSU as part of the Digital Animation and Interactive Media track, and spent the summer working as a Residential and Teaching Assistant at CCAD as part of their College Preview Program. At OSU I also work as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate Design Foundations course- it's been fun working in a college classroom, and I've really enjoyed taking a step closer to education and the teaching process.
I started the MFA program last month and hit the ground running. My current focus is in virtual and augmented reality research, and their potential applications to education and lifestyle. That's... quite a large topic, so I'm hoping to spend the next year experimenting and researching to narrow down my interests. I've already been able to experiment with some new processes in class- we used the motion capture lab here at OSU to capture data for an animated music video. Myself and another teammate used a combination of particles, fluids, and furs in Maya and applied them to the figures. I have not worked with dynamics in awhile and never with motion capture, so this was a fun learning process. I'm posting the full project on my home page soon with the completed video.
I'll begin posting more project progress on here again and writing a little more about what kinds of research I'm doing for the future. For now I'm just excited to get started!